Just when you thought Chromebook support from manufacturers might be fading, it looks like Sony is moving forward with a Chromebook of its own. The Sony VAIO VCC111 Series pictures and manual just showed up on the FCC this week, and in case there’s any doubt as to whether this is a Chromebook the reference to “start Chrome OS” on page 2 of the manual should put an end to any debate this might be a Windows machine Ultrabook:

And furthermore, check out the keyboard, it’s missing the Windows key, you just get Ctrl and Alt keys on the lower left side, a further indication of this being a Google Chrome OS machine:

Since the FCC has furnished us with photos of the upcoming VAIO Chromebook (albeit low resolution pics, in typical FCC fashion) let’s take a tour around to see what you get:

Left Side View – The power jack, HDMI port, microphone jack and headphone jack are all found on the left side

Right Side View – There’s an SD card reader and two USB 2.0 ports over here

Back View – Not much to see here, apparently it has Chrome accents as it’s reflecting lights in the FCC lab there

Front View – A green light indicator can be seen, according to the user guide the green light here indicates whether power is on or off

Bottom view – It appears the battery is removable and you can see the typical Chrome recovery method there that involves jamming a pin into a small hole, a la resetting a wi-fi router or modem.

Finally, we can see the Chromebook open and being measured with an approximate depth of 21cm or 8.27-inches for those of us still not on the metric system.

It’s still not clear what the internal specs are for the VAIO CC111, but with the user guide and pictures we can at least deduct some of those. The bottom picture of the Chromebook has a sticker that indicates it has an 11.6” Samsung screen and the CPU is a “T25”. This could be an Nvidia Tegra 2 T25 ARM based processor, which would be interesting as it would make for the first Chromebook to run on a non-Intel based processor.

So far Samsung and Acer have been the only manufacturers to release Chromebooks, so this is certainly a win for Google to have another manufacturer jump into the fray. It seems like Sony has been dragging its heels on the release. The documents for approval were first submitted to the FCC last September and just this Wednesday the user guide and FCC test photos showed up:

Pricing on Chromebooks generally start around $299 – $400 range, so we’d expect this Sony to be about the same, based on pictures there doesn’t appear to be anything extra special Sony has done to warrant a higher price. There are very few Chromebooks currently available, the Amazon Chromebook store lists only four and one of those (the Acer AC700) is out of stock, so it’s interesting to see Sony toss their hat into the ring now. We expect availability to be within the next couple of months or so based on past experience of the time it takes to migrate from FCC approval to landing on shelves.

Now the only mystery remains is to when will Sony release an Ultrabook…

Dual-core ARM Processors are fine! The main most important feature of the processor is the memory bandwidth. Initial Tegra2 devices have slow memory bandwidth, hopefully the Nvidia T25 has a much improved memory bandwidth and a higher clock speed!

In fact, the Dual-core TI OMAP4470 goes up to 1.8Ghz, same with the Dual-core Qualcomm MSM8960 Krait S2. So hopefully this new Nvidia Dual-core has a similar high clock frequency and a memory bandwidth that can compete with TI and Qualcomm!

There are many use cases where a Dual-core clocked higher is actually preferable to a Quad-core clocked lower. For example the Dual-core TI OMAP4470 at 1.8Ghz is mostly better/faster than a Quad-core Tegra3 at 1.3Ghz.

[…] From a hardware perspective, all of the ChromeBooks today run on Intel x86 chips, but Google originally said ChromeOS would be supported on ARM chips as well and Motorola has years of experience with these. And recent code for the ChromeOS project hints at support for a new Samsung Exynos ARM-based chip so ARM products could be around the corner — Rumors point to Sony readying one such device. […]

New, more powerful chips should make Chromebooks even more attractive to potential buyers. As more people adopt Chromebooks more will also want to use them to access their Windows applications, especially for work.

One possible solution for this requirement is Ericom AccessNow, an HTML5 RDP client that enables tablet users to connect to any RDP host, including Terminal Server, physical desktops or VDI virtual desktops – and run their applications and desktops in a browser.

Ericom‘s AccessNow does not require any client or other underlying technology to be installed on end-user devices – an HTML5 browser is all that is required.

You can choose to run a full Windows desktop or just a specific Windows app, and that desktop or Windows app will appear within a browser tab.